Operations strategy (OS) formation in very small and new start-up organizations is a
topic that until now, has not been paid much attention by OS scholars. Current OS
literature in this area has been generated from studies that have been carried out
mainly upon large and well established corporations. In this regard, an action research
intervention to investigate how OS is formed in a very small and new start-up firm has
been successfully deployed. This research has found a mismatch between what is
currently described in current OS formation literature and what actually happens in the
very small and new start-up firm in practice. The OS formation observed in this
research was a very dynamic process where all four OS perspectives met; bottom-up,
top-down, market requirements and resource based perspectives. However, this
process was mainly influenced by a resource-based process driven by the emergent
effects generated by the effective deployment of the firm's indirect capabilities. The
indirect capabilities of this firm turned to be, at the simplest level, the ability that the
firm 's founder-manager had for creating a strategic network of external business
collaborators and gaining access to their resources and capabilities to foster the
development of her firm 's OS. At a more complex level, they turned to be the
dynamic ability that the founder-manager had for finding new scenarios to deploy
those already accessed resources and capabilities, and managing and influencing them
in a way that they would keep providing further access to further external resources
and capabilities to foster her firm's OS development. A guideline to help founder-managers
with very limited financial resources to foster the development of their
firms ' OS formation process is offered.